Local Blogs

By Paul Losch

Jobs, Small Business, Candidates and Politicians

Uploaded: Mar 4, 2010

As a small business owner who has managed to hang on the last couple of years, and with no assurance that things are "coming back," I am tired of the platitudes people in office or running for office enunciate around "small business."

Tax credits? I'm not looking for tax credit. I am, as are many peers I talk with, trying to make sure that I am running a viable business. Tax credits are downstream, the business has to be viable before tax credits kick in. If I am making money, I am happy to pay taxes.

Here is what makes small businesses suffer, IMHO--all the *&%$# insurance costs--medical (as I choose to offer to employees and for my own benefit,) liability, property, workmans compensation--easily over 10% of company revenues. Cost of doing business, and excessive. Excessive rent when buildings near my company sit empty. Minimal order quantities from vendors when sales volume is from my customers is down.

"Too small to succeed" is the plight of small businesses. "Too big to fail" is what some of the assholes that attended Harvard Business School, as I did, managed to cajole tons of money out of W before he left office and Obama since he became President.

Neither party has a clue what small businesses are about. W talked about it while he was in office, with little to show for it. He never had a real job in which he succeded, business-wise, he was just using "Daddy." The Texas Rangers don't count.

Obama talks it up as well, and his time as a community organizer, a law professor and a politician also is showing litle understanding.

When it comes to the race for California Governor, only Steve Poizer comes close to understanding what a small business experiences. Meg Whitman, for all that she has accomplished in her business career, has been part of corporate environments from the time she started at Procer and Gamble and left EBay. Jerry Brown is hopeless when it comes to experience in this realm.

Smart or stupid, if you have not been there and done that, you can spout the platitudes, and not understand what it is to make a payroll and maintain a viable enterprise.